Between Blindness and Corona ... Who will answer the questions of our human tests?

As a mother of two young girls, I feared being exposed to the new virus "Corona" (Covid 19). I began to behave like my co-worker with a high level of hygiene, as she always showered us with her health measures because she feared infection in the normal days.

The female colleague keeps a bottle of alcohol with a sprinkler and wet wipes, and does not accept anyone as well as do not let someone sneeze a spray in the air without raining a shower from her ready spray that always sterilizes the parts .., but - from the very first moments of the spread of "Coffed 19" - I was not separated by novel events. Blindness "by Portuguese writer Jose Saramago ... as if speaking now!

That little boy who suffers from blindness brings me to mind, and how he lived amid harsh procedures in a place where all the injured were held without his mother .. As a mother I feel a responsibility to protect my daughter from that attack, and as a person who believes in destiny I know that what is written will happen.

Fear is not always a wise counselor! Until now; I let them go to school while many mothers refrained from this, and on a daily basis they exercised their right to play with their friends after returning from school, and as the days progressed and this epidemic reached our city, they caught me red-handed with other ideas and actions, motivated by fear and revealed by experience and governed by morals.

I became worried about my daughter's Asian friend whenever she invited her to play, and I ask my oldest daughter every day about her Chinese classmate from which city she is, and is she still attending her daily lessons?

The events of the novel chased me in my dreams, imagining my friends under the stone, and others wandering the empty streets in search of food and security, and asked myself in a loud voice: How will our feelings and principles control our actions next if the situation worsens?

The difficulty is not living with people but understanding them! In his novel, Saramago spoke of a mysterious disease that struck a man who was driving his car, and suddenly he saw a bright white he called the term "white blindness", and in the shadow of everyone's anger at him - for disrupting their traffic from the signal that he lost his eyesight at - and with a human swab; a man offered to help him and connect him to His house, only to find out later that he was a thief who stole the poor man's car.

In the novel, we pity the latter and curse the first, and events accelerate, so that the blind is the reason that the disease is transmitted to the general people in his town, only because he decided to go to the doctor to examine his strange condition!

Everyone is injured, but at varying times ..; his wife, the thief, the doctor, and all who go to his medical clinic and those who have had contact with them, and then the entire city is infected .. except for one woman who was not infected by the disease despite her contact with her husband.

Despite this, and in light of the state imposing a quarantine on the injured, the wife insists on being with her husband, pretending to be blind to witness to the human potentials around her, their behavior, choices, human weakness and changes in light of their fear.

"If we are unable to live like human beings, then at least let us do all we can to not live like animals!" Killings for fear of infection, rape of women with the consent of their husbands, sale of free food, leaving the dead without being buried, starving young people and stealing their rations; all of these are acts committed temporarily against two blind or blind people together.

I passed through my mind all those stories that the novel told about how to provide food and drink to these injured people, and move as far as possible from them, and the panic that plagued the streets and public markets in search of food and drink, and the fear of death that prompted some to eat live animals and bury the rest of their manhood just to keep On their lives ... death permits ... and mobilizing the animal part of our humanity just to survive!

The situation is not much different now with "corona". We have all seen healthy people target injured or even suspected people, which he called "coronophobia", a term that appeared with the panic that swept the world from everyone with Asian features.

My heart takes off, feelings of compassion and fear collide together as I watch these footage from the city where neighbors block the entrances of entire residential buildings to those in them; thus without any compassion or opportunity for life that may be available; so that they do not come out and cause their injury, and so they condemned them to death !

And that young man who decided to commit suicide from one of the highest bridges because he did not find a refuge in a hospital. And outside China, we saw the spread of video clips of striking young people in several countries and intimidating them, and asking them to leave those countries only because they have Asian features, so everyone who carries these features must raise the slogan "I'm not a virus"!

This situation did not stop at individuals, but rather exceeded it to the countries. Some refused to receive the "Diamond Princess" after the spread of the epidemic among its passengers, and it remained roaming between countries and increasing the cases in them due to the passengers' contact with each other in a very limited place. To hundreds of passengers.

Perhaps we have not lived through these measures in our Arab world yet, but the Internet has brought the distances closer and made us know part of what is going on in these closed cities as is the case in Wuhan. More than fifty million people are trapped in their homes there, filled with feelings of fear and anxiety more than we think.

"Blindness is if one lives in a world in which all hopes are dashed!" How did the situation reach humans - in the twenty-first century when everyone praises human rights and openness - that it kills a group's life because they have contracted the disease!

And where are all those scientific techniques and technological advances that they told us that they are able to be saved from any disease or even to imagine it, in a world where robots are controlling everything? Where is all this now in front of a disease described as a strong cold targeting the respiratory system? Weakness of man, no matter how he pretended by force!

Here comes the most important question: Why do we direct our fire to the injured as if they were responsible? There is no one among us who can prevent the common cold from afflicting it and not blame our brothers or children if they caused it. So why should we fast those who are infected and take a hostile success from their presence in our surroundings? What would we expect if we were injured, especially given that the death rate is only 2% of the total injured?

“Even in the worst of adversity, you may find enough good.” Saramago depicts what we lose from our humanity at the time of adversity, and how we need help in the simplest needs if we lose our humanity before any other sense, as happened with the sight.

In that novel, Saramago summed up the meanings of ignorance and fear ... and detailed what we can feel in extreme test cases .. approaching the zero hour .. weakness .. fear .. revolution .. love .. hope .. betrayal and forgiveness .. surrender For destiny and try to change it.

Imagination was unable - at the time of reading - even to embody the meanings of the pain that I felt at the time, when I finished the novel that I would pass one of its tests soon, in another century and with other details, but it is the same fear and desire to survive, how we act, what we will sacrifice and how we will trust in strangers Who will stay next to us until the end?

And in the darkness of that world that the writer painted, it seems that we have all become characters in a novel, and we have to prepare ourselves to answer questions passed on the pages of books, which we thought were just ink on paper to be entertained in our spare time!